Aneurysm Clipping: Preventative Surgery

Neurosurgeon Min Park, MD, explains how the clipping procedure cuts off blood flow to a brain aneurysm, preventing bleeding or rupturing.

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Transcript

An aneurysm is a blister that forms off the side of a blood vessel, and one of the traditional ways to address that is to perform surgery. Clipping of aneurysms is a surgical procedure where we attempt to exclude the aneurysm from the normal circulation. That involves making an incision along the scalp and removing a small portion of the bone.
Fortunately, aneurysms are usually located within folds of the brain, so we can carefully navigate around the brain and get to where we see the aneurysm. We place a little titanium clip right where the aneurysm arises off of the blood vessel, and that way we can keep the aneurysm from filling with blood, which drastically reduces its chances of causing a bleeding event in the future.

One of the biggest concerns that patients have following surgery is how well they're going to recover. I like to tell patients that it is a weeks and months long process to fully recover from a major operation such as aneurysm clipping. We would expect the individual to return back to their normal quality of life once they've fully recovered from the surgery.

One of the main benefits of surgical clipping of aneurysms is that it tends to be much more durable than some of the alternative treatments. Very rarely do we need to go back to treat aneurysms a second time following the surgical clipping. We're fortunate here at the University of Virginia to have the Nerancy Neurointensive Care Unit, and that is a dedicated intensive care unit with specialists that are trained specifically in neurological disorders.